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Just a quick update to say that I’m moving teams inside Oracle. My new position is as Product Manager for the MySQL Server 🙂 This is a great opportunity for me to be more directly involved in developing MySQL, and something I’m very much looking forward to. It will also mean many of my future blog posts will appear on the MySQL Server Team blog instead of here on my personal blog.

(The MySQL Community Team is now looking to fill a vacancy. The ideal candidate will be based in Europe. Please let me know if you are interested. I’ll put you in touch!)

The second part to this update is to say that I’ll be touring Europe for almost all of February. You can catch me in Brussels, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Munich, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Dublin, Manchester & London. Please check out the announcement blog post for more details!

If you are in San Francisco on October 27, 2015, please come along to our MySQL team reception at Jillian’s at Metreon. You do not require an Oracle OpenWorld pass to attend, all we ask is that you please register in advance.

When selecting from information_schema tables in show_compatibility_56=OFF mode, an error will now be produced:
mysql> select * from information_schema.global_variables;
ERROR 3167 (HY000): The 'INFORMATION_SCHEMA.GLOBAL_VARIABLES' feature is disabled; see the documentation for 'show_compatibility_56'

(Previously this was a warning + empty set returned)

When show_compatibility_56=ON, users will now be able to select from either information_schema or performance_schema tables. This presents a more viable upgrade path for users that need some period to transition.

The show_compatibility_56 setting itself will remain deprecated, as it was from its introduction. This signifies that we intend to remove INFORMATION_SCHEMA.GLOBAL_VARIABLES in a future release.

Outside of the scope of today’s update, my colleague Mark Leith has also volunteered to blog with examples of how the new performance_schema tables now expose variables down to the thread-level. This will add more context as to why we are moving this meta data from information_schema to performance_schema. Thanks Mark!

So thank you again to Giuseppe and Shlomi for helping make a better MySQL. We’re delighted to incorporate your feedback!

In order to make it easier to work with data stored as binary strings (BINARY/VARBINARY) we are considering extending the &,|,^,~,<> operators, to accept any-size binary strings and return binary string data as response. This can be useful for several complex data types not covered by the basic SQL data types (e.g. working with IPV6 addresses, manipulating UUID, etc).

Motivation

Let’s say we’re interested in getting all the networks that contain the given IP address. With ipv4 the common practice is to store the IP addresses as INT and execute:

At the moment you are not able to do the same with ipv6 because inet6_aton('2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334') & netmask converts both operands from VARBINARY to BIGINT resulting in data truncation and when the & operation gets executed, the result is incorrect. But, if the & operator could have worked directly on BINARY/VARBINARY data, this would have been possible:

The SQL standard does not define bitwise operations over any-size binary string data but it does define binary string comparison:

All binary string values are comparable. When binary large object string values are compared, they shall have exactly the same length (in octets) to be considered equal. Binary large object string values can be compared only for equality. For binary string values other than binary large object string values, it is implementation-defined whether trailing X’00’s are considered significant when comparing two binary string values that are otherwise equivalent.

Thus, the standard allows binary strings to be zero-padded in the least significant part for comparisons (right-side). If you’re interpreting binary data as a hexadecimal unsigned integer, you would expect the operand with smaller size to be zero-padded to the left side. So an easy approach to avoid confusion would be to allow the operators(^,&,|) to only work with same size operands, thus avoiding any confusion over whether padding occurs in most or least significant part.

Another aspect to be mentioned is that the old behavior with INT arguments would be preserved. Example SELECT 23 & 4 would still return a numeric BIGINT response: 4.

MySQL has two ways of representing hexadecimal string literals: x'val' and 0xval (where val contains hexadecimal digits 0-9, a-f, A-F). The difference between the two is that the first is SQL standard and has a constraint: the number of hexadecimal digits must be even, the second version is not standard and does not require an even number of characters (it will be zero-padded on the left side in case of even number of characters). But there is one issue, in numeric contexts, hexadecimal values act like integers (64-bit precision) and in string contexts, they act like binary strings. So currently when executing SELECT x'10000001' & x'00000001' the operands get converted from VARBINARY to BIGINT(int64), with loss of any parts beyond 64 bits, and this returns BIGINT; with our change, this would return BINARY(4), breaking existing applications. That’s something that can be solved with a new sql_mode named BINARY_BIT_OPS_YIELD_BINARY, off by default for backward-compatibility; if turned on, bit operation on binary strings will yield BINARY result (or an error if operators are not of the same size).

The alternative would be to introduce new functions. Example bin_and(x,y), bin_or(x,y), bin_xor(x,y) that can take two binary string arguments of same length and return binary string. We are considering also other names like binary_and(x,y), binary_or(x,y), binary_xor(x,y).

Better control over which databases and database objects (tables, views, stored programs, user accounts) to dump

Dumping of user accounts as account-management statements (CREATE USER, GRANT) rather than as inserts into the mysql system database

Capability of creating compressed output

Progress indicator

What I wanted to caution however, is that mysqlpump is not currently consistent. That is to say that currently each of the dump threads lack a synchronization point before they start backing up the data. This makes it currently unsafe as a general purpose backup replacement.

The mysqlpump developers are aware of this limitation, and are busy adding this feature into the utility.

The optimizer team has also allowed cost constants to be configurable on both a server and a storage engine basis, and we are confident that the default InnoDB engine will always work “as good as MyISAM” (which has a natural advantage, in that the optimizer was originally largely built around it.)

Today, I want to issue a challenge:

Find an example where the optimizer picks the wrong execution plan for InnoDB tables but is correct for MyISAM. If you can demonstrate a reproducible testcase, I have a polo with MySQL 5.7 Community Contributor on it waiting for you.

The supplies of this special edition t-shirt are limited, but I will ship it to you anywhere in the world 🙂

The MySQL 5.7 Community Contributor Polo, as modeled by Daniël van Eeden. I’m the guy on the left.

A new system variable super_read_only allows a more strict definition of ‘read-only’ which also applies to super users.

A new disabled_storage_engines setting offers a way to prevent an enumerated list of storage engines from being used. For example, a DBA may wish to enforce an InnoDB-only policy to simplify common operations such as backups, but it’s possible MyISAM may sneak back in via new code-deployments. This setting allows more active enforcement.

These features are the fruits of our engineering team meeting with our users at Percona Live this year. Thank you to Percona for once again hosting a great conference, and in particular thank you to @isamlambert (and the GitHub Engineering team), @John_Cesario, @denshikarasu & Rob Wultsch for specifically requesting these two features 🙂

Having a number of very similar ways of completing the same task makes it very difficult for training, documentation and support. To explain this in more detail: in our manual we have always tried to document every option that the server will accept, but with no functional difference between the options, this makes the content more verbose and clumsy to read.

MySQL usage becomes cleaner by stating which usage is explicitly preferred, even if the old syntax remains supported for the legacy use-case.

The syntax is non-standard and complicates our parser. While it may take some time before we are able to remove these options, by starting the deprecation cycle now we can provide application authors with as much notice as possible.

Our proposed plan is to deprecate the syntax starting with MySQL 5.7. We will assess feedback from our users before targeting a version for syntax removal.

Will you be affected by this change? Please leave a comment, or Get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.

The (11) does not affect the storage size of the data type, which for an INT will always be 4 bytes. It affects the display width.
Our rationale for proposing this should be deprecated is that it is a commonsourceofconfusion amongst users.

We are also discussing deprecating the non-standard ZEROFILL type attribute, which is the only modern consumer of this display width meta data. For example:

In the case of a CHAR(5) the storage requirements will only be one byte higher than that of an integer. In the case of other data types (phone numbers requiring leading zeros) it might be slightly more efficient to store as an integer.

Option #2 – Format integers at a different layer

This option retains the storage efficiency of an integer, but moves the presentation into the application. For example:

It will also technically be possible to retrofit this into legacy applications that require ZEROFILL presentation returning from MySQL. This can be done with a query rewrite plugin to modify SELECT statements to add padding:

Conclusion

We are seeking feedback from the community in response to this proposal. If you have found the existing behavior confusing, or will be affected by the removal of zero fill, please leave a comment or get in touch! We would love to hear from you.